> There are thousands of awesome packages out there
Statements like this are terrible for latex adoption and with all due respect an exaggeration bordering on bullshit. "OMG, I need to learn about thousands of packages to write my paper? Screw that I am using LibreOffice or Word."
I doubt you can come up with a list of 2,000 awesome packages. It looks like CTAN has 1500 packages and a lot of those are obsolete, redundant and/or just plain "not awesome." More importantly I would be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of users can get by with less than 50 packages. A quick grep of you x3-paper repo and it seems that all of your use cases combined also fall under the 50 packages mark. A new user can get started and produce quality documents with far less than 50 packages.
I might have gone overboard with "thousands of _awesome_ packages", but the CTAN I'm looking at lists 4706 packages from around 2000 authors. I'm not sure how you determined that most of these are redundant and/or obsolete. At least MacTex seems to ship with quite a lot of them (2.3G with 600M optionals).
> I would be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of users can get by with less than 50 packages.
When did I claim that this is not the case? Less then 50 packages yes, but not the same packages for all users.. Many packages for many different use-cases.
> Statements like this are terrible for latex adoption
Yeah sure, because the people here at HN will think "Oh no if there are thousands of packages I will need to learn _all of them_ before writing my first document.
I'd say that what's terrible for LaTeX adoption is that it's terrible annoying to write...
Hell, in most of my documents I'm hard-pressed to find a use for more than 5 packages, let alone 50. My résumé isn't using any packages at all right now; it's just using vanilla LaTeX, since I think that looks nice enough and it's easy enough to manage.
I doubt you can come up with a list of 2,000 awesome packages. It looks like CTAN has 1500 packages and a lot of those are obsolete, redundant and/or just plain "not awesome." More importantly I would be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of users can get by with less than 50 packages. A quick grep of you x3-paper repo and it seems that all of your use cases combined also fall under the 50 packages mark. A new user can get started and produce quality documents with far less than 50 packages.